but it didn’t matter if there was no one there to criticize. It was all a learning experience, and by the time that Titus started coming to dinner, she found that she knew what she was doing, and it was obvious that the compliments he paid her on her cooking were genuine. Such a contrast to her husband, who had never said anything about the food she put in front of him; he was too self-absorbed to care about what he put in his mouth or what his surroundings looked like.
And she’d also begun to paint again for the first time in as long as she could remember, taking advantage of the long summer evenings after work to ride her bicycle out onto Port Meadow with a folded-up easel across her back and her watercolours and paper in a canvas bag hanging from the handlebars. She’d been quite good once, or so her tutor at the art school that she’d attended for a year after college had told her, and she’d enjoyed the paintings and sketches she’d made on the sunlit holidays in France and Italy that she’d taken with Bill in the years after they were first married. In fact she didn’t really know why she had stopped. Lack of encouragement perhaps. Whatever the explanation, it was certainly Titus’s encouragement that had got her started again. She had hung one or two of her old pictures on the walls of the little flat that she’d rented behind Keble College, and he’d stood admiring them on his first visit, wanting to know the name of the artist. And then when he found out it was her, he’d insisted on taking her to an art supplies shop he knew down a tiny side street off George Street and buying her the materials to start again.
‘It’s a crime,’ he’d told her in a voice that brooked no argument, ‘to waste such God-given talent.’
And since then she hadn’t looked back. The painting made her happy, and when she painted, she thought of Titus.
Vanessa’s paintings now covered the walls of her flat, lighting it up with colour and life. It was a small place, just enough for her needs, but she’d grown to like it more and more as the months passed. She’d deliberately rented the flat unfurnished and then bought the furniture herself piece by piece. She didn’t have much money. The temporary job that she’d taken on as a secretary and personal assistant to an overworked professor in the university’s English faculty didn’t pay well, but she had come to relish the challenge of shopping on a shoestring, finding treasures in secondhand stores that she’d never previously heard of, down narrow side streets in parts of Oxford that she’d never visited before. She’d made her own home and she was proud of it. The flat, of course, was a million miles away from the grandeur of Blackwater Hall, but Titus genuinely seemed to like it there when he came to visit.
He had a way of making her seem special, and in his company she had begun to come alive again. It had been more than three years now since Joe died and she still felt the pain. It was there all the time but it was dulled. After it happened she’d spent more than a year feeling that the world was entirely without point, dragging herself through every day in a grey blur. She’d contemplated suicide more than once, even weighed up the pros and cons of the different possible methods of putting an end to her pain, but she saw now that she had never been truly serious. The will to live was too strong inside her. It had flickered for a while like a guttering candle, but it wasn’t going to be extinguished. And her anger against her husband’s silence, his refusal to try to move forward, was in a way the first sign of her recovery. Titus had arrived at just the moment when her desire for life had first begun to outweigh her guilt at living. And now she was halfway to falling in love.
CHAPTER 3
‘You can’t let them get to you, Davy. That’s the point. Whether it’s that bitch who put you in here, whether it’s the screws, or whether it’s the other cons, you’ve got to remember it’s your life, not theirs. And you’ve got to keep it that way.’
Just as he had done every night for the previous two weeks, David Swain lay on his back in the dark listening to the voice of Eddie Earle coming down to him from the bunk above his head, and, as always, he felt that same odd mixture of irritation and gratitude. Irritation because Eddie kept calling him Davy – a nickname that nobody else had ever used and that David really didn’t like – and because Eddie never seemed to stop telling him how to live his life. Gratitude because he gave David a sense of security that he’d been missing ever since he’d first arrived in prison following his arrest more than two years earlier.
It had got worse after his conviction – much worse. The judge had thrown away the key, had called him a coward, a knife-in-the-back murderer, and sent him down for life. And overnight David had become a number, an object to be moved around without explanation from cell to cell, from wing to wing, from gaol to gaol, until he’d ended up back where he’d started – in Oxford Prison. Days, months, years of terrible food and waiting in cold corridors, of boredom and claustrophobia banged up in tiny airless cells, had brought David full circle.
It didn’t surprise him that he’d ended up back in Oxford. Nothing much surprised him any more. Prison was cruel, and here, locked away in the centre of his own hometown, it was just a bit more painful than anywhere else. That’s all. A few hundred yards away on the other side of a thirty-foot brick wall surmounted with barbed wire, the world he’d left behind was going on without him, impervious to his absence. In the mornings he could hear the bells ringing in Magdalen Tower and in the afternoons he could see the tallest spires of the city’s churches from the prison exercise yard. So near and yet so far; the proximity of the world outside was an exquisite torture.
And he was very different now from the man he’d been when he’d begun his sentence, less and less able to cope with the despair that was eating him up from the inside. Physically, he had survived. There had been pushes, punches, even a few kicks along the way, but he had got through them. And it could have been worse. David knew all about the mindless violence that was always waiting as a possibility around the next corner – God knows he’d seen it often enough, but so far he had avoided the worst by keeping his head down, not answering back, not getting involved.
Spiritually and emotionally, however, it was a very different story. Over time he had learnt to accept the arbitrariness of prison life: the endless petty rules that existed only to be broken, the lack of choice. And he had tried to get used to the strange combination of noise and isolation, his twin companions through the endless long days and sleep-interrupted nights. But underneath he had lost hope and purpose. His personality, already fragile and damaged at the time of his arrest, had disintegrated under the stress of prison life, and the anger and despair that raged inside him were now only kept in check by fear. He longed for someone to cling to as he sank, for someone to hold him up, and then, entirely unexpectedly one day, a friend appeared. He was called Eddie Earle.
With a smile David remembered the day that his new cellmate had arrived. He’d been alone for over a week, ever since O’Brien, the previous occupant of the top bunk, had been transferred to the punishment block in D Wing for attacking another prisoner with a pool cue in the rec room. O’Brien had not been a bad cellmate. Tall, taciturn, and religious, with a permanent furrow etched across his massive brow, he’d actually gone so far as to give David a book called JESUS FOR PRISONERS. David hadn’t yet read more than the first paragraph but he appreciated the thought. Gifts weren’t a daily occurrence in HM Prison Oxford.
O’Brien’s problem was his temper. It was what had got him put away in the first place. And he had an enemy on B Wing who’d been goading him for weeks. Something about taking too much food in the canteen, something stupid, but still O’Brien shouldn’t have reacted. He only had himself to blame. And his departure had meant that David had had to start worrying again about who would be coming in next to share his ten-by-ten cell and stinking chamber pot. Not some crazy, he prayed after lights-out to a God he had no faith in whatsoever. Not some fucking crazy psychopath. But he needn’t have worried. Eddie Earle, Easy Eddie as he liked to be known among his friends, was nothing like that at all.
Eddie had self-respect. If David had had to name one quality that singled out his new cellmate, that would’ve
